In just about 15 minutes, I'm going to teach you how I went
from this grayscale painting of Hoyeon Jung from squid game to this colored version.
I also want to give a big thank you and shout out to Best Buy and Wacom
for partnering with me to bring you this video on their Wacom
one tablet here that we will talk about later on in the video.
Really quick here -
Another thing: if you're interested in following along in the video,
I actually have a free download of this entire episode
that you can use to follow along.
If you want to understand what, I'm going through a little bit more
because I know it can get a little bit complicated at parts.
So the first thing that we need to do here is actually explain
how blending modes work.
And I'm going to tell you the six blending modes that I use
to convert things from grayscale to color.
If you're already aware of this, just skip ahead in the video. (3:17)
So blending modes are simply just taking a layer.
So I'm going to open up this original here,
and you can see I have the mean to reference that I used.
And you just go up here and hit this right here
and you can see all the different blending modes that are available.
So the main ones that I use are normal, which is just your basic layer
just acts normally. It doesn't do anything special.
Then I use two layers to lighten and darken.
So I use the lighting layer
for lightning things and then multiply for darkening things.
The next two layers I use do the same thing,
but they tend to change the colors and make them more saturated or more vibrant.
So when it comes to lightning, I like to use overlay,
and when it comes to darkening, I like to use a linear burn.
Now, today we're not actually going to use linear
burn for this image because it's pretty high key.
And the last layer that we use is, of course, the color layer down here.
It is going to be the basis
for coloring in the image, and it's really technically all you need.
Although, of course, most people say not to use it that much
because it can be very difficult.
And I want to share really quickly why that is right here.
What you're looking at is the exact same images this one, except
this one has everything removed except for the color information.
And as you can see here, if I zoom in, it looks pretty weird.
You can't really tell if you can't even tell who she is, really,
because values tend to make a lot more,
give us a lot more information when we're looking at things.
However, what I will do here is I will take this layer that just has the colors,
and I will show you that I have this layer that's black and white, right?
No tricks being here, and I'll put this layer over it
and I will change the blending mode of this layer to color.
And what you're going to see is that it magically looks exactly the same
as the colored version.
I'll bring the colored version on top and show it and hide it,
and you can't see a difference.
This tells us that all we really need is the color layer to color something, but
the two reasons why we can't really do it when we paint are that one.
This color layer that we see here is incredibly detailed.
If I show it to you again, just normally, every single pixel
changes very slightly in a way that we can't really tell here.
And so if you're
going to try to paint this, I mean, look at how weird this looks like
can only tell that her skin is separate from her lips by the color.
So it's really, really hard to be able to paint that accurately.
The second reason is that normally when you're painting using color,
the color sticks with the stroke.
But when you're coloring, using the airbrush over the painting
you did,
if you have a very painterly style, it will look a little bit weird
because the colors won't match up with your strokes.
That isn't a big problem for us today,
since we're going to be coloring and focusing on the skin.
As you can see with the grayscale version here, it's fairly smooth.
So let's go ahead and dove right into the different blending modes
that we're going to use to color this portrait right now.
So if you look to the right in the layer stack,
you can see all the layers that I use to color this, and I color coded them
accordingly and name them accordingly, so it's easier to understand.
Now, before you even start doing the colors, I have to these red layers
and these are just the different versions of the grayscale painting I did.
The first one looked like this.
This is how I normally paint, and it ends up with the values
not being too dynamic because I like to keep things safe.
But you might want to play with the levels in Photoshop or whatever painting app
you're using in order to get it to be a little bit more poppy like this.
You can also choose to make it like this at the end,
but I like doing it in the beginning, so I have a better idea of what's going on.
Next up, the first step is probably one of the most important steps
that you should try to get right.
However, there's two methods to do it, so I'm going to show you both
and you can pick which one you want.
The first one I have here is called Option A.
And basically, you want to start masking out the different areas.
But when it comes to skin, you want to just pick the average local tone.
And so if we try to average out an estimate, what the average
skin tone for our whole unit here is, I would say it's about a tan.
It's not very orange.
It's a very bright, almost white in some areas.
So I just put a tan color here, and he used the color blending mode.
You can see this is set to color right here.
If I click on it and it's set to full capacity
and I just colored in the areas where his skin is .
So the next step you're going to want to do after that
is the same thing where you color the different parts of the image.
So we still have to color in her shirt or bra straps and her hair
and the hair doesn't matter as much because as you can see in the reference,
it's really, really dark. And there's.
Only a few subtle hints of color here and there.
Before we go on,
I want to show you the second method of addressing those local base values,
and it's really something that I use for the skin here because her shirt
and her hair are pretty basic, like I mentioned before for the skin.
Yes, you can do option eight where you just do a tan value,
but you can also use what we call a gradient map here.
And as you can see, if I flip back and forth,
the gradient map is a lot more interesting than the basic tan value,
although it does look a little bit weird because I didn't spend as much time
fine tuning it.
So how this works is basically you just apply a gradient map
to the entire piece, and once you click on it,
you can go to properties and then click on the gradient map.
And as you can see here, different colors and map
to different values of the value scale of the original painting I did.
So I did a dark purple for the darkest colors,
moving into a little bit of red, orange and then a very bright yellow.
Then what you do after that is you want to mask it.
So I have a selected layer here that is masking
the gradient map to only the areas of the skin,
and I could have done one for her shirt and her hair as well.
That gives you a little bit of a boost in the process so that you already
have some color variations before you go on to using the blending modes.
So basically, you can pick whichever mode you want to use
or whichever option, but I just went ahead and did both.
So that's why you see the second option be blue layer here, because what this says
is just option
a bit toned down a little bit to calm down the redness of this Option B that I did
with all of the interesting values that I used in the gradient map.
And of course, we still need the color for her shirt and her hair.
So I'm going to turn that layer on to now before we go ahead and talk
more about the different blending mosaic I use to cover the skin.
Let's talk more about the Wacom one pen display that I'm using.
The Wakeham one is a 13.3 inch pen display
that needs to be connected to a computer device to be able to use it.
And honestly, I think you guys can remember that I used
it first back on my channel with my PC, and now I'm using it with my MacBook.
You can also use it with an Android device that makes it really, really portable.
It has a really nice full HD display and has a battery free pen that works
honestly, just as well as the other higher end Wacom display pens.
It also has a 26 millisecond response time, and basically what that means
is that there's not going to be any lag or ghosting,
and you're not going to notice too much latency while using it.
It's not going to feel like
you're painting in slow motion and this thing can't catch up to you.
It's pretty fast.
This tablet also has really, really nice integrated pop out legs here,
which are pretty sturdy.
I'm going to show you the back here and also has some rubber feet.
If you want to use it,
feel like I'm using in this video, which I'm doing
just so that you can see it a little bit easier .
It's a little bit harder here, but boy,
is it a nicer experience to draw on like this.
And honestly, it's a good enough angle for me.
This is really comfortable and just again compliments that portability.
This is great for people who are a little bit more advanced
in their creative understanding and want a little bit
more freedom than even something like a big old antique would have.
Because those things are really heavy
and it's nice to be able to pair this with my MacBook.
It's nice to just carry it around,
and you can use this with any laptop, basically, and again, your phone.
You guys know, I love a minimalist setup, and this is definitely passing
the test for me.
And let's be honest, here it's the holiday season.
So if you're looking to give anyone
the gift of art and creativity, this is definitely a great option.
And if you're just looking to pick something up for yourself
to step up your game
and you're used to using a regular tablet that doesn't have a display,
this is a pretty good option as well because you can get a lot more accuracy.
I found when you have a display tablet versus a regular desk tablet,
if you want to check out the welcome one.
Check out the Best Buy links in the description or the pinned comment below.
All right, so let's do a really quick recap.
We did our grayscale painting.
We added a little bit more contrast to it.
We decided that we wanted to go
with a little bit more of a complex option for adding the base values for the skin.
We also added the base local colors.
Let me see the right word for this shirt and the hair, and now we're ready to move
on to adding a lot more of the vibrancy and complexity into the skin.
So this next layer I have called base color variation,
and this layer is set to overlay because I wanted to start
to add a little bit more variation to the colors as a layer says.
And I wanted to add some nice reds to the cheeks here.
So if I turn it on and off, you can see it starts to look a lot more alive.
And so what ended up happening is that I set this to 33%
and this makes it so that it's not super intense if I bring it all the way up.
You can see she starts to look like she's like she's hit by a nook
and she has nuclear radiation.
She's like super, super heated up, like she's been burned to a crisp by the sun.
So I brought that down a little bit in that made the colors
look a lot more appealing.
Now I want to show you guys actually a little bit more
of how the colors should look when they're on their own.
So I'm going to go ahead and hide everything here, and I'm
going to take this layer, bring it about all the way up to 100%.
And we can see here how I decided to pick the colors.
So if we start from the hair, I added a light blue in a dark purple to the hair.
And if you look here, you.
I can see that those colors are pretty evident in her hair here as well.
They're very subtle,
but they're there and they help make things a little bit more realistic.
And now when it comes to the face.
Remember, we started from this tan value.
So I wanted to introduce three new colors.
There is going to be pinks here for her lips, her nose, her cheeks
and her forehead, as you can see, gets pretty red up here.
And I add a lot more oranges to the bottom of the cheeks
and some parts of the arms in the neck.
And as you can see here,
there's a lot more orange and darker around here on this side.
And under her chin there as well.
And then the last color I added was a little bit more of a yellow
because it starts to get a lot more yellow in these brighter areas.
So you just need to be able to kind of slow down and look and see and squint
your eyes and see what kind of colors you can see changing under
here as you move around the different parts of her skin there.
And the key tip to this, as you can see here, is that I used an airbrush.
What this allows us to do, like I mentioned before,
is that when we stack layers on top of each other, the airbrush allows
things to melt and makes a lot easier than if you were to just paint it
straight on like you're painting it regularly using opaque brushes
combined with setting the layers to different opacity levels.
So this one again, I'm going to set it back to 33% really, really
helps with that beautiful layering effect that's going to give us this
lifelike skin.
So if I turn those layers back on, let's go ahead and move on to the next part.
And this one is going to be the cool gray layer.
And if you look closely, you can see what's happening.
I'm going to turn it on and off again,
and it adds a little bit more realism to this.
And if we look back, if you remember, if I turn off the main colors
layer and I show you the original again with just the colors,
you can see that basically there's what three colors here.
There's the pink for her lips and her shirt.
There's the orange for her skin, and everything else is pretty much gray.
And so this is a big tip.
When it comes to coloring skin, a lot of the colors are very desaturated.
They're not nearly as saturated as you would think.
So when we go back here to our colors layer, these cool
grays do a lot to bring the colors back to a realm of reality.
And I just use a simple, cool gray in the areas where I saw gray in the image.
So again,
let's hide everything else so that you can see exactly what I was doing here
might be a little bit harder to see, but I think it'll come up good on screen.
So in these cool gray areas, you can see added some
a little bit of warm grays to those highlights here.
And then you can see the cool grays
I just put on the cheeks a little bit on the chest.
If we look here, you can see these bright areas are pretty much gray
inside her clavicle or pretty gray.
And on top of her arms, right where the shoulder connects is gray
and a lot on the top of her cheeks here.
Now you might notice something here, and that's that.
I'm not really following the lighting of the reference.
I wanted to do a simpler, more stylized, top down lighting.
And so that's why everything looks a little bit more symmetrical here
than it does in the reference where she's lit from the right now, I'm
going to go ahead and show you the rest
without actually showing you how they look on top
so that we can get through them a little bit faster.
The next one is going to be the lips and the accent colors.
And so if we look at this basically again, it's just a little bit
more pink for the lips because I noticed that they didn't show up as well.
And then I added some more oranges where I felt that they would be fit.
And so let me show you the color layer.
This is set to color, and then this one was actually set to 100%.
And let me go back. I didn't.
I don't think I mentioned the cool grays
that was actually set to normal and 100% as well.
I found that
when I just painted the cool grays down, they looked exactly how I wanted them to.
Next, we have the bright yellows in that this was just basically where I noticed
that the brightest areas tended to be very, very cool and a little bit yellow.
So if we look here, you can see those bright areas
where I wanted to highlight the forms coming out.
So the top of the face plain here, her neck coming down to her chest there.
I had a lot of those brighter colors and I found
I needed a little bit of a greenish tone, some areas,
because if you look really closely, you can see some green hues in her skin.
So again, this is basically green but completely desaturated and very close
to yellow because, you know, right next to yellow going to be orange and green.
So I just added a tiny little bit of the green there,
and you can barely tell, but it really adds a lot.
Once we show you the entire layer stack, and again, like I mentioned before,
this layer is going to be set to lighten because I
just wanted to lighten those colors without adding
too much saturation because these lighter areas are pretty pale.
Now this let's layer, you'll see when I show
you guys the entire stack come together is what brings it to life,
and this is going to be the subsurface oranges.
Basically, this is going to be a color that happens in any skin tone
that you see out there.
And if we look here, you're just going to see a lot more oranges here.
And I painted those where I felt like you see the most intense color
changes happening on the skin here
and basically to this can have a whole video on it.
But basically, what's going on is when light passes through your skin,
it catches some of the color of your blood and the skin itself,
and it comes out another color, and that's what makes it really vibrant.
And so this is happening here, no matter where you are,
if there's light hitting you, skin has a lot of subsurface subsurface
scattering in it, and it makes it look very vibrant.
That's why our skin looks alive.
And if you don't have this,
no matter what you do, it can tend to look dead
when you're coming from grayscale to color.
And again, in order to do this, this layer is set to overlay
and again, 100% in order to brighten it.
Because it's light, right?
Subsurface scattering is light coming through her skin.
And I said it to overlay because I wanted to change
that and make it more saturated, whereas using lightning would have just
added more oranges in a very flat way, not changing the colors around them.
And then at the end, you can see this cool wash layer is just that a soft, light
and opacity. 45.
Now this one is a little bit separate.
I said it's a soft light just to lighten everything up a little bit
and change the color a little bit.
So I didn't mention that in the beginning because I don't use it as often.
But think of soft light as just an in-between between lighten and overlay.
It changes the colors a little bit, but not too much, and it still brightens
things up a little bit.
So if we look here, you can see a very light ghosting of the overall
value of everything is just settle a little bit of a blue.
So with everything here, you can see that this was our final result
and I'm pretty, pretty happy with this again.
Let's go through and just quickly hide everything.
I love doing this where you get to see the layers come to life and just one by one
and all of the steps and everything suddenly becomes
magical and colored .
And honestly, it was really surprising to be able to see all this come together,
especially with how, you know, everyone says not to use grayscale
because you can do it real well, but you can just depends.
You need to have something smooth
and you need to take some effort into making sure your layers have enough
layers and blending modes and care to them so that they actually melt
and mix nicely together.
So let's show you all of the blending modes together
without actually showing you the image below it and see how that looks.
Now this layer, you might be wondering What is that, Josh?
What does that paint over layer?
And basically, if you're here, it's going to look really weird.
This is what I do after I have everything there and it's like, OK,
I'm happy with the colors.
Let me just go ahead and paint over them.
So if I go ahead and do the big reveal and show you this layer right here,
you can see all the colors work really, really nicely together.
So the most important thing I did here, if you notice, is I noticed
the top of her mouth over here got really, really white and I didn't want that.
I wanted the white parts of the image to just be the highlights.
So I went ahead and I color picked this area
and I just painted this area on top a lot so that we could have those white areas
near her nose and on the highlights of her lips where we wanted.
And I'll erase this line work later, because that
ended up changing a little bit as I painted.
Now you might be looking at that final layer and that layer looks like this.
And honestly, you can see that it's not too different.
But basically what I did is I got a lot of the finishing touches,
added some imperfections on the face.
I tweak the colors overall a little bit more into spent a few more hours
painting, which was really easy because now I have all the colors there.
I can just paint
and adjust little things here and there without worrying
about messing up my major, messing up the values.
So that will be it for me today.
Please let me know what you think and let me know if you tried this, please
Typekit.
Let's see or go color
if you want to show me your process on Instagram
and if you want to check out the welcome one.
Check out the Best Buy links in the description or the pinned comment below.
And if you want a more in-depth version of any of these tutorials and see how
actually painted the Grayscale one , because let's be honest,
that is where the bulk of the work was.
I spent three hours on that painting.
If you want to see a very slow down time lapse of that and have me talking over it.
I'm going to be providing that for this month on my Patreon,
so please check out that in the description as well.
Thanks so much for watching everyone.
Keep trying and stay positive piece.